Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As businesses grow and develop, so must the tools that help manage them. Application monitoring tools provide enterprises with a way to keep track of the health and performance of their applications and ensure that everything is running smoothly. Application monitoring tools have a wide range of capabilities and data that enterprises can use to help answer questions about the current state of an application.

Mature start-ups and scale-ups create wonderful and challenging environments for Engineers. As the product they’re creating matures and the brand becomes a successful one, the user base generally starts growing, and, for some companies, in places they might not expect it to grow. As that happens, new challenges arise for Engineers. One of these challenges is pretty straightforward to guess. Basically having a particular product available throughout different regions of the world.

Kubernetes is an open source platform that, through a central API server, allows controllers to watch and adjust what’s going on. The server interacts with all the nodes to do basic tasks like start containers and pass along specific configuration items such as the URI to the persistent storage that the container requires. But Kubernetes can quickly get complicated. So, let’s look at Vanilla Kubernetes — the nickname for a a K8s setup that’s as basic and elementary as it gets.

If your organization is embracing cloud-native practices, then breaking systems into smaller components or services and moving those services to containers is an essential step in that journey. Containers allow you to take advantage of cloud-hosted distributed infrastructure, move and replicate services as required to ensure your application can meet demand, and take instances offline when they’re no longer needed to save costs.

In order to make reliability improvements tangible, there needs to be a way to quantify and track the reliability of systems and services in a meaningful way. This "reliability score" should indicate at a glance how likely a service is to withstand real-world causes of failure without having to wait for an incident to happen first. Gremlin's upcoming feature allows you to do just that.

Arm processors have become increasingly popular in recent years, providing energy-efficient, cost-effective processing power to both mobile and cloud computing ecosystems. As a part of this growth, more and more organizations are choosing to leverage the many benefits of Arm-based architectures for their containerized workloads. Today, Google Cloud announced its Arm-based Tau T2A virtual machines (VMs), which you can also use to run workloads in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

In distributed systems, middleware is a software component that provides services between two or more applications and can be used by them. Middleware can be thought of as an application that sits between two separate applications and provides service to both. In this article, we will see a role of middleware in distributed systems.